2009-04-02

Among the bankers who enjoyed a normal day of work was Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England. As the bank's ancient granite headquarters was pummelled and spray-painted by rioters, he reportedly worked calmly inside, undisturbed.

“The recurring joke of the day has been ‘spot the banker,'“ said Dan Wheeldon, who works near Moorgate tube station, a protest clash point.

“There seemed to be more of a festival atmosphere than anything else.”

Festival atmosphere? Festival atmosphere??

At its peak, the protest saw a modest crowd of 4,000 people throwing themselves at a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland – one of the few buildings in the district that, for reasons unknown, had not boarded up its windows in anticipation of a much larger action.

The more adventurous anti-capitalist rioters smashed its windows, threw flares inside, and entered its vacant lobby.

The irony was hard to avoid: RBS, along with most other British banks, was nationalized last year in an effort to save it from collapse. It now effectively belongs to the people, for what it's worth.

“Even if we break through to the vault, I doubt we'll find much in there,” protester Steve Elmond said as he backed away from truncheon-waving police during one of a handful of skirmishes outside the bank.

One protester reportedly died after collapsing at an anti-capitalist protest camp outside the Bank of England. But reports last night suggested that he had not been subject to police violence and died of natural causes.

Does this sound like any festival you've been to? This is hateful actions by hateful people. Aminta Xenakis needs to be smashed in precisely the way she wants "capitalism" smashes, mostly because she's too rank stupid to have a clue what capitalism actually is.

And here's a hint Doug Saunders: 4000 destroying a building is by no means "a modest crowd", and your "that girl deserved to be raped" attitude towards the Bank of Scotland not boarding up their windows like they needed to be terrified in the dark while this bunch of useless left-wing nitwits parades around in the street like they owned the place.

In a sane world, Bank of Scotland would have had snipers on the roof shooting anybody who made the slightest amount of damage to their building. But we see that even in Alberta even reasonable responses like Brian Knight are prohibited, while damaging other people's property is a-okay right in front of that property's owner.